Friday, April 24, 2015

After spending a great
deal of time listening to a large variety of bands labeled
"Krautrock" while reading and reviewing Julian
Cope's Krautrocksampler,
I started thinking about the term and what it really means. Cope,
like many others, criticizes the term as being a lazy British
invention that collected together a disparate set of unrelated bands
under one label. Nonetheless, Cope uses the term extensively to the
point of naming his book after it. He and others have claimed that
the term was derived from Amon Düül's first album, Psychedelic
Underground (1969), which contained a track titled "Mama
Düül und ihre Sauerkrautband spielt auf". By the time Faust
titled a song "Krautrock" on Faust IV in 1973, it
was already done in a spirit of jest and parody.

Plenty of other terms
were used in and outside of Germany for the various forms of "new"
music coming out of German-speaking countries around the late 60s and
early 70s, but the most common one (in Germany, at least) was
"Kosmische Musik", i.e. "cosmic music". Cope
cites Amon Düül II's debut album, Phallus Dei, and Can's
debut album, Monster Movie, both released in 1969, as the
first rumblings of this movement. Whether those two albums really
represent that term well is questionable, but the core of the idea
was music that was progressive, forward-looking, future-oriented, and
perhaps psychedelic and drug-induced. Then and now, Kosmische could
mean proto-ambient music or it could mean trippy guitar jams.

[The first pressing of "The" Can's
Monster Movie.]

Part of the problem is
that these two terms, Krautrock and Kosmische Musik, are not
necessarily the same thing. Krautrock is often used as an umbrella
term for all German rock bands of the era, and Kosmische sometimes is
as well, but this is rather confusing and ignores the nuances of both
terms. It would seem that originally they did mean two different
things, albeit with substantial shared ground. In fact, if I may
indulge in the art of organization and categorization, I would say
that there are at least six distinct styles or trends or genres of
music that came out of Germany in the Krautrock era. Here's how I
might break it down:

1. Space Jams,
Psychedelia and Acid Blues Rock: This may be the largest
grouping, but what unites it is a predilection for long guitar-based
jams. Bass and drums go without saying, and keyboards are often
included as well. Vocals are optional. These songs usually "rock"
in some sense, perhaps owe something to jazz or the blues, and often
have a psychedelic, trippy, "far out, man" aesthetic.
Examples include Guru Guru, The Cosmic Jokers, Kraan, the first side
of most Ash Ra Tempel albums, many early Amon Düül II songs, much
of Agitation Free, and maybe even Annexus Quam. Xhol Caravan is
perhaps a soul-derived variant of this, and Embryo might be a
particular jazzy version. These bands excel in energy and virtuosity
and usually have good grooves. The downside is that they are
sometimes lacking in substance and prone to self-indulgence.

2. Progressive Rock:
I'm using this category for bands that sound like they may as well
have come from the British prog rock scene – except that the vocals
are distinctly accented and sometimes even deliberately bizarrely
intoned. I'm talking about "progressive" in the sense of
bands like Yes,
Genesis, and King Crimson: complicated song structures, intricate
arrangements, bombastic sound, exploratory vision, and so on. The
German bands in this vein aren't necessary derivative, but this is
perhaps the closest grouping to any segment of mainstream
Anglo-American music. I would include bands like Jane, Birth Control,
Grobschnitt, and later Amon Düül II. This music is usually full of
surprises and a good mix of intellect and fun, but can also be
over-the-top and excessive.

3. Experimental,
Academic, and Sound Collage: This might be the earliest variety,
arguably descending from Karlheinz Stockhausen's compositions such as
Telemusik in 1966 and Hymnen in 1967. Most of these
bands come from an art school background and liked experimenting with
sound and unusual methods of sound production. The "studio as
instrument" cliché could easily be applied here. Much of this
music is arrhythmic, and all of it is instrumental. This is
pre-synthesizer, but in the heyday of tape loops and studio
ingenuity. Unconventional instrumentation (for rock music, at least)
such as flutes, violin, bells, and glockenspiel are common. Good
examples are Kluster, early Cluster, early Tangerine Dream,
Organisation, and early Kraftwerk. Autobahn is right on the
line and perhaps the last prominent example. This is music that can
easily be derided as overly "academic" in the sense of not
being particularly listener-friendly. There is a lot of creativity
and a wealth of ideas, but only a minimal attempt to address these
traits to the interests of a conventional listener.

4. Ambient and
Cosmic Soundscapes: Although Brian
Eno might be credited (correctly or otherwise)
with spurring the genrification of ambient music, I would argue that
Komische bands were the initial instigators. (Note that Eno did not
disagree and in fact recorded albums with Cluster and Harmonia in the
70s.) These bands preferred long, slow moving, spaced out sonic
explorations. Most of these bands are instrumental, most used
synthesizers and electronics, and only occasionally did they dabble
in rhythm. The best of the bunch include Tangerine Dream, Cluster,
the second side of most Ash Ra Tempel albums, Klaus Schulze, Cluster, and Harmonia. Popol Vuh also fit here, although they also ventured into
more "world music" directions. Note that most of the major
players of the third category migrated to this style in a matter of a
couple years. Much like later, more widely accepted variants of
ambient, this music is too easily regulated to "background"
status, and often suffers under the strain of focused listening.
Nonetheless, as "mood music" they usually succeed in
establishing a nuanced, textural playground.

5. Space Folk:
This might be the smallest subset, at least as far as my knowledge
goes, but I think they deserve a unique space. These acts play some
version of folk music, where vocals, acoustic guitars, and various
forms of hand percussion are central. This is more than just standard
folk music in that there are psychedelic tendencies, extended song
structures, and sometimes even a jam atmosphere. Bands that belong
here include Amon Düül (in particular Paradieswärts Düül),
Witthüser & Westrupp, Hoelderlin, and the second half of Amon
Düül II's Yeti (which are improvisations that in part
include members of Amon Düül). For fans of folk and psychedelia,
these bands represent a unique variant of conventional folk music.
Prog- and hard rock-oriented types may be put off by the overly
hippie-like aesthetic and the relatively subtle energy.

6. Innovative Rock:
This is the hardest group to pin down and typify. I think these bands
are what really drove the British idea of the existence of a unique
German genre of music (i.e. Krautrock). These bands could perhaps be
described as progressive or psychedelic, but they don't really sound
anything like Anglo-American prog and psych bands. These bands are
loosely "rock" groups in some fashion, but often have jazz
influences. They are usually rooted in conventional rock
instrumentation, but seem to favor keyboards and electronics. The key
is that the music is almost always rhythmic and driving, with a very
strong propulsive energy and a certain restlessness. It's no surprise
that the punk and post-punk movements clearly owed a lot to these
bands. I'll admit this category is something of a catch-all for bands
that don't easily fit elsewhere, but I think that's actually the
point: these are musicians that really transcended their antecedents
and their surroundings and made something truly new. The
difficulty of ascribing existing titles to the style is perhaps why
Krautrock became such a pervasive term. The key bands here are Can,
Faust, Neu!, Kraftwerk (from Autobahn through Trans-Europa
Express), and La Düsseldorf. I might also include some more
overtly electronic acts like Wolfgang Riechmann and later-period
Kraftwerk. I think the bands in this category are practically
faultless and thus represent the best of German music from the
70s.

[The
inner sleeve of Kraftwerk's Trans-Europa Express.]

It's hard for me to
hide that I think the bands in group #6 are the best of the lot. They
have been my favorites since I first started looking into these
various movements, and they still are now. That's not to say I don't
like bands from the other divisions, but I tend to find them a more
mixed bag. There are exceptions, such as Harmonia, whose blend of
ambient, experimentation, and pulsing rock I find delightful, and
Paradieswärts Düül, which
I find surprisingly beautiful. Conversely, Julian Cope seems
to enjoy an odd mixture from each group except #2 (the straight prog
groups). We mostly agree about the strengths of #6, but we disagree
on many of the other details.

More important than my
preferences, though, is the nature of the categorization. There is an
inherent problem with making a rubric such as this in that the
divisions are somewhat arbitrary and overlapping. These groupings all
share plenty of attributes, such as nontraditional song length and an
explicit sense of looking to the future or outside of the norm. These
supposed divisions are really spectra within a multidimensional field
of possibilities, and most bands don't fit perfectly under any single
label. Some bands are particularly challenging: Can skirted many
styles all at once, and both Cluster and Kraftwerk made several
distinct changes over their careers. Then there's Ash Ra Tempel,
where the two sides of their albums are consistently divergent.

[Cluster's Sowiesoso.
This is the cover of the CD reissue, which was the back cover of the
original pressing, but I actually prefer it to the original cover.]

So does "Krautrock"
just mean "German music that rocks", i.e. groups #1, #2,
and #6? Does "Kosmische Musik" equate with the
proto-ambient music of group #4, or does it also include the cosmic
rock of group #1? Or does it stretch to include anything vaguely
cosmic, spacey, other-worldly, or "far out" (presumably
groups #3 and #4, but possibly also #1, #5, and #6)? I think it is
problematic to call all German music from this era "Krautrock"
(why not just call it German music and drop the slur?), but at a
minimum I do think the sixth category deserves some special
recognition – bands like those really didn't exist anywhere else.

The problem with
"Krautrock" and "Kosmische Musik" is that they've
been used so many times to mean different things, sometimes
overlapping and sometimes explicitly distinct. I propose that we
either drop those terms or decide on specific meanings for them. In
the meantime, we should group these artists by their actual styles,
as I have, or perhaps by the historical associations they had with
each other, be that based on record labels, geography, or some other
metric. I would like it if we called all of this music "progressive
German music" and perhaps restricted "Krautrock" to
group #6. We could call group #1 "German cosmic rock", #2
"German prog rock", #3 "German cosmic experimental
music", #4 "German cosmic ambient", #5 "German
cosmic folk", and #6 "German innovative rock". Maybe
then we would have terms that actually mean something consistent!

One final note: the
Freemans' The
Crack in the Cosmic Egg lists, in
addition to all the bands I've mentioned and plenty more I haven't, a
few bands from the late 70s Neue Deutsche Welle movement. This is
somewhat surprising only in that it seems hard to find fans of both
Krautrock and NDW. Much like punk and post-punk in England, NDW
consciously rejected much of what came before, or at least digested
it into bold new forms. The problem here is that the Freemans' choice
of NDW bands is rather inscrutable. They list Din A Testbild but not
Einstürzende Neubauten; D.A.F., Der Plan, and Pyrolator but not
Abwärts, S.Y.P.H., or Palais Schaumburg; and Nina Hagen (probably
just because her band was once part of Lokomotive Kreuzberg) but none
of the other various German punks like Mittagspause, Male, The
Wirtschaftswunder, or Fehlfarben.
I consider these aberrant inclusions in such a list to be
unwarranted, as the punk/NDW scene was really quite a different
movement.

Friday, April 17, 2015

I inherited an interest
in Krautrock and Kosmische Musik in the good old fashioned way:
through my dad's Kraftwerk records and an older friend in college
that lent me his Neu! collection. I eventually started picking up
remastered Can CDs, and when I left the USA to live
in Germany for a year, I decided I would
make a habit of digging through record stores in search of treasured
old German albums. With great persistence, I managed to find a good
batch of Neue
Deutsche Welle albums, but I actually
had a very hard time finding Krautrock records. It turns out those
albums usually have complicated histories of limited pressings by
various labels, authorized or otherwise, and they always sell at high
prices. The only exceptions were La Düsseldorf, whose incredible
first two albums I found at cheap prices, and Wolfgang Riechmann,
whose lone album was a lucky find.

I continued my search
upon return to the States. I started finding expensive Faust and Amon
Düül I/II reissues, and with the income of a full-time job, I could
finally actually afford them. Somewhere along this process, I started
to hear about Julian Cope's Krautrocksampler, supposedly the
premier source of information on these bands and others. I knew Cope
well from The
Teardrop Explodes, an excellent
post-punk band, so it was believable that he could be an authority.
However, the book was long out of print and impossible to find, just
like most of the records. At one point, a bartender overheard me
talking about it and claimed that he'd just sold his copy for a
couple hundred dollars. This was the stuff of myths – again, much
like the records.

Eventually I managed to
acquire a copy. It's actually a rather slender book of only nine
chapters and about 140 pages. It's also very poorly edited, rather
poorly written, questionably accurate, and highly subjective. That
doesn't make it a worthless book, but I was quite disappointed by the
lack of an attempt to be balanced, objective, thorough, methodical,
consistent, or comprehensive. If you manage not to worry about those
things, and somehow excuse the occasional ableist language, it's at
best a mildly enjoyable read, mostly because Cope lets it play out
more like a fabled story instead of a historical document.

The book starts off
with some background information covering the roots of Krautrock,
such as the 60s student riots, The Monks, leftist politics, Karlheinz
Stockhausen, the commune movement, Yoko Ono, and a general desire to
make new music that wasn't just rooted in Anglo-American rock music.
But after the comparatively well-written, organized, and thoughtful
first two chapters, the remaining seven are each dedicated to a
particularly notable band or two. These chapters are dominated by
Cope's overwhelming predilections for storytelling and hyperbolizing,
which prevent the narrative from getting sidetracked into things as
trivial as facts. His language gets even more casual and excited to
the point that it becomes hard to trust his opinions. (Example: "It's
hard to feel spiritually satisfied by Neu 2 but it is truly
pretty fucking good.") While such nontraditional descriptions of
music can sometimes be clever and enlightening, they often leave you
wondering just how subjective those experiences are.

While the sections on
Neu! and Can are mostly reasonable, the section on Faust has been
hotly
contested, and the Amon Düül section
lacks any great insight. The book really veers into total mythic
territory for the sections about Ash Ra Tempel and the Cosmic
Couriers. There might be some truth to the wild tales of Rolf-Ulrich
Kaiser and his mostly unwitting gang, but the whole thing is hard to
take seriously, especially since Cope is so fanboyishly fond of the
Cosmic Jokers albums. These albums may have had their moments, but
they were constructed under questionable circumstances and sound
quite dated and indulgent today.

The last fifty pages of
the book take the form of an appendix of Cope's top 50 Krautrock
albums, reviews of these albums, and several prints of album sleeves.
Some of this content is great to have, but most is rather trite. In
particular, his choice of the best albums of the genre is very
strangely distributed. He generally selects the first three or four
albums by his favorite bands, along with everything related to the
Cosmic Couriers. But why exactly is Amon Düül II's Tanz der
Lemminge excluded? Where did Moebius and Plank's Rastakrautpasta
(1980) come from, if almost everything else on the list is circa 1969
– 1975? There are also albums like Guru Guru's UFO and Klaus
Schulze's Cyborg that were hardly mentioned in the primary
text. (The Guru Guru choice is especially questionable, since their
next few albums after UFO are actually better.) It's also
incongruous that several albums by Popol Vuh are in the Top 50 when
they were largely ignored elsewhere in the book. And considering
Cope's tastes, it's certainly odd that Agitation Free are only
mentioned in a tiny extra blurb on the very last page of the second
edition.

Cope is allowed to have
his own preferences, but he does a disservice to his work by lacking
consistency and failing to even mention countless other bands that
were part of the same movements. He clearly downplays the influence
of Kraftwerk (only listing their practically forgotten 1970 debut
album in his Top 50), despite that they are probably the only
Krautrock band in the mainstream consciousness (although in fairness
there is plenty of information about them elsewhere). He might also
be right to dismiss bands like Jane (too hard rock) and Embryo (too
jazz fusion), but what about bands like Annexus Quam, Hoelderlin,
Paternoster, Xhol Caravan, Grobschnitt, or Kraan, to name just a few?
These bands might be second-rate to the bigger names he does cover,
but it is inaccurate to pretend that there were only a few players on
the scene(s).

The final straw for
this book is the number of typos and mistranslations. Many, many
German words are misspelled, and it is clear that no one fluent in
German ever proofread the book. "Aufspielen" means "strike
up", not "speak out", and "Gelt" should be
"Geld", and it means "money", not "gold"!
How is it that these errors still made it to the second edition?
Mistakes like these only further reduce Cope's legitimacy and
reinforce the notion that his perspective is that of an outsider.

Supposedly, Cope has
not reprinted the book in many years because he admitted there were
too many factual errors and realized there were greater authorities
on the subject. While I think Cope is right, unfortunately, most of
the existing literature suffers similar faults. There don't even seem
to be any remotely comprehensive German-language works on the
relevant movements. (I'd love to be proven wrong.) Compared to Cope's
book, Krautrock: Cosmic Rock and Its Legacy (2010; edited by
Nikos Kotsopoulos) seems similarly short and incomplete, and the
relatively new Future Days (2014) by David Stubbs also seems
heavily opinionated, just with a different set of biases (see here
and here
for reviews). The best-looking publication might be The Crack in
the Cosmic Egg, first published 1996 as a book and later as a
CD-ROM. It seems to aim to be the most comprehensive guide, but
judging by the "light" version freely available
online, it lacks a certain amount of
critical analysis. It's also worth remembering that AllMusic,
discogs.com, and Wikipedia (especially if you read German) generally
have a lot of this information, too, along with the scanned album
sleeves.

For better or worse,
Krautrocksampler is still considered the most important
resource on the subject, probably just because it got there first. If
Cope opened the door, then I'm thankful for it, but his work cannot
be considered authoritative or definitive. While the upbeat and
enthusiastic tone gives the book an encouraging rush of energy, the
poor language and many typos and errors render the book ineffectual
and unsatisfying. He does cover a lot of great music, so I would hate
to think that the low quality of the book would reflect negatively
upon the subject matter. Seek out these bands, but follow some other
guide.

Thursday, April 9, 2015

At first, once you get
past the introductory remarks and explanations, you can't help but
wonder why you are reading someone's private diary. Brian Eno makes
no attempt to mask the fact that A Year with Swollen Appendices
is really just a journal, and it takes a while to appreciate why
there is anything worth reading in it. You gradually begin to
appreciate the moments of brilliance interspersed among the mundane,
and realize that if he can manage to squeeze so many great ideas into
what is merely a personal journal, you are only the scratching the
surface of his vision.

Since Eno initially was
just writing it for himself, the diary mostly describes the everyday
human minutiae of existence that even a famous musical producer has
to go through. He describes his family in detail, he documents what
he cooked for dinner, he mentions various personal sexual
preferences, he diverts his attention with vacations, he attends
parties and ceremonies and film screenings, he meets with friends and
famous names, and of course, he spends plenty of time in his studio.
Most of these activities are profoundly boring, but a few are
profoundly fascinating. It helps that Eno's language is clear and
clever, such that even his descriptions of the mundane can be
uplifted by his tendency to make simple comments that belie his
peculiar ability to see the world from unusual perspectives. After
describing a meeting with a Hollywood director, he writes, "How
determined people seem to be to aim for exactly the same target again
and again." Reflecting on the film Basquiat, he critiques
the nobility of the "artist's struggle" and muses, "Funny
people don't make films about the struggle of being a postman or
dentist." He has a similar ability to pick the perfect quotes
from others, in particular the utterly absurd lines spoken by his
young daughters. These moments are a large part of what makes the
book worth reading.

The other main draw
that makes the book worth reading is all the appended material, such
as excerpted emails, explanatory footnotes, and the actual
appendices. This supplementary material is where Eno truly shows the
breadth and depth of his ideas and his abilities. Large sections are
devoted to his thoughts on emerging technology (he is mostly
unimpressed with the directions chosen) and to the ongoing fighting
in Bosnia (he is deeply involved with War
Child). Some of the appendices are so
good that they could be published independently as essays. (Maybe
that's what blogs are for now.) Several presage ideas that now have
mainstream currency. A few of the standouts are Axis thinking (as
opposed to binary divisions), Celebrities and aid-giving
(self-explanatory but thoughtfully handled), Culture (as in, what
does that term really mean?), Defence (and how it is budgeted),
Sharing Music (as in, sharing credit and thus how musicians get paid)
and Unfinished (in reference to media, as a better term and goal than
"interactive").

There is one other
major reason to pick up the book, and that's for the references to
the various major recording artists that Eno works with throughout
the year, namely David Bowie, James, Jah Wobble, and U2. These
sections are often less exciting one might expect, as Eno often just
describes tedious details and personal frustrations, and many songs
are referred to by working titles which aren't always easy to
cross-reference with released versions. This is especially the case
for James, where the sessions were inconclusive, the band re-recorded
most of the material with other producers, and the finished album
(Whiplash) wasn't released until 1997. It also turns out that
he never meets with Wobble and has just sent him multitracks to remix
and reconfigure.

The sections with Bowie
and U2 are more interesting, but for different reasons. Eno has long
relationships with both of them, but seems to think of them
differently. Bowie appears as a longstanding friend, someone with a
similar manner of thinking, with varied interests and a lot in
common. The album they create together (Bowie's Outside) is
challenging, forward-looking, deeply nuanced, and for the most part,
quite good. It's one of Bowie's career peaks, and when he calls Eno
while touring to tell him how well things are going, it's no small
pleasure to hear it.

Eno's relationship with
U2 is perhaps more complicated. He clearly gets along with the band
quite well, shares many interests with them, and respects their
musicianship and ability to inflect their music with strong emotion,
but between the lines one can detect some reservations about the
sincerity of these emotions, and Eno is fairly critical of other
aspects of the band. He mentions that U2 are in the process of
acquiring a
hotel, which Eno balks at. It also seems
like no coincidence that in the middle of recording with them, he
writes a lengthy bit in his journal about his rejection of religion
and mysticism. At any rate, the album they create together (Original
Soundtracks 1, released under the collaborative pseudonym
Passengers), is rather good, but somewhat unlike other U2 albums, if
for no other reason than Bono's vocals are distinctly downplayed.

A strange part of the
book is reading about various events but not quite realizing what all
is happening unless you look it up elsewhere. The most obvious are
just the album release dates that largely go unmentioned, but there
are many others. On September 12, Eno is suddenly Modena, Italy,
performing two songs live on stage with Bono, The Edge, and Luciano
Pavarotti. Little context is provided, but it turns out this was part
of an annual concert that Pavarotti hosts for humanitarian causes, in
this case the Pavarotti
Music Centre of Mostar, Bosnia, and the
concert was even officiallyreleased!
At another point, he suddenly is working feverishly on The
Help Album, a charity album produced
by War Child. In fact, Eno spends quite a bit of time devoted to and
writing about War Child and the war in Bosnia. I probably know more
about the war now than I ever did from hearing about it as a child
and reading about it in high school history classes.

If there is a downside
the book, it's the relative inconsistency and the annoying difficulty
of sifting through the tedious details. Eno mentions many, many
names, and most are left without context. These could be famous names
that I don't recognize, but surely it isn't worth looking up every
single one, and so I just let those parts be lost on me. The book
requires a lot of flipping back and forth, in part to try to
cross-reference names and places, but also to go read the appendices
as they are mentioned in the primary journal text. The appendices are
almost all first-rate, but they are essays and stories and emails of
disparate natures. The journal is cohesive in the sense that it is
linear, but it too changes over the course of the book. Some days he
writes very little or even nothing, other days he goes on at length
about one issue, or he discusses a series of trivial matters, or he
excerpts from email correspondence. And at some point in October, he
decides to publish the journal, so his style gets much tamer, more
organized, and more expository. It's not actually all that
distracting, but sometimes I felt like I was spending too much time
wondering about what was left out or what was worth looking into
further elsewhere. Actually, maybe that isn't a bad thing.

Finally, I will leave
you with a few more of my favorite quotes from the book:

"Oblique Strategy:
Take away as much mystery as possible. What is left?"

"Do very hard
things, just for the sake of it."

"It's the sound of
failure: so much of modern art is the sound of things going out of
control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart."
(This is in reference to things like the prevalence of distortion in
rock music.)

"Instead of
thinking of people as male or female, think of a multi-axial field of
possibilities running between these two poles. Then look at people as
disposed throughout it -- and capable of shifting when mood and
circumstances require. Encourage exploration. Encourage new hybrids."

Score: B+

Bonus scores:

Outside, by
David Bowie: A-

Original Soundtracks
1, by Passengers: B

P.S. I very much
appreciate that he believes backing vocals solve most problems, but I
disagree on the part about oyster sauce.

P.P.S. Certainly the
figure cited as Eno's advance from Faber and Faber in the
introduction (100,000,000₤) cannot be correct. Was that a typo or
what?

P.P.P.S. It used to be
a joke in some of my
early posts that I would somehow find a way to mention Brian Eno
in every review. After all, he is something of a godfather/patron
saint/significant reference point for many or most bands I like. I
gave up on dropping his name so frequently, but I still could if
given the challenge!

This is one of the most
popularly bootlegged concerts in the history of these three
performers. It's quite a special moment, as this trio hadn't
performed together since Nico separated from the Velvet Underground
in 1967, and they never would again. Here, they share each other's
songs, and the whole thing is done acoustically. If that weren't
enough, Cale plays two songs he never released ("The Biggest,
Loudest, Hairiest Group of All" and "Empty Bottles",
which was given to Jennifer Warnes), and Reed's solo songs ("Berlin"
and "Wild Child") are played in rather different
arrangements than appeared on record. Even if the musicians are
clearly a bit out of practice, and the instruments aren't always
quite in tune, this is a very special concert.

But everyone seems to
already know that, and what I really want to address is the
legitimacy of this album in its commercially released form. The 2004
release by Alchemy Entertainment (with a Pilot catalog number) is
supposedly legitimate, but I've always been skeptical. Pitchfork,
Wikipedia,
and the Fear
Is a Man's Best Friend John Cale fansite
all list it as an official release. But then why didn't the album
appear on any of the musicians' primary labels, most of which are
major industry players? A bit of research into Alchemy
Entertainment's catalog shows a rapid
string of releases, all of dubious quality, all circa 2004.

Take for example the
Joy Division albums Les
Bains Douches 18 December 1979 and
Preston
28 February 1980, both live albums with
long histories of releases on dubious labels. Both are supposedly
"official" releases, yet have questionable quality,
idiosyncratic
errors, and features common to all bootleg versions. In the
meantime, Joy Division enthusiast The
Analog Loyalist has notably compiled and
remastered a much improved and substantially more complete bootleg
version of the Les Bains Douches concert. If the commercially
available version was indeed an official release, then why is The
Analog Loyalist's version obviously superior in every way? Why do the
"official" albums have a history of releases on dubious
labels like NMC/New
Millennium Communications (some of which
share the Pilot catalog numbers) and Get
Back?

Note that the Bataclan
album has a similar history
of multiple labels (including some of
the same as the Joy Division albums!), all of which seem dubious. The
most recent release (and the one I ended up with) is on Keyhole,
which appears to be a relatively new bootleg label, and clearly known
as such even to discogs.com – every catalog item is listed as
"Unofficial"!

Furthering my
skepticism is that the various versions of this album contain several
errors. "All Tomorrow's Parties" is often labeled as an
encore (it was not, as far as I can tell). It is also sourced from an
audience tape instead of the soundboard used as the primary source.
These are the same sources that have been traded as bootlegs for
years upon years, and this "official" version is not
remastered, more complete, cleaner, or better in any capacity. Worst
of all, the whole thing plays conspicuously slow, presumably because
it was mastered at the wrong speed.

I am not the only one
who is skeptical about the legitimacy of these releases, and
according to this
thread, John Cale even took action
against the pressing of this album at some point. Richie
Unterberger's White
Light/White Heat also
confirms that Lou Reed was not pleased to learn about the album. I
am curious to find more definitive answers, so if you have additional
information, please share it. It's worth noting that I am certainly
not against trading bootlegs of unreleased material, especially if
the artists have approved such trading (as they often do). What
bothers me is the idea of people making money off of these recordings
without anything going to the artists in question. Anyway, why buy
bootlegs when trading of lossless audio is so easy via torrents and
sites like the Live
Music Archive?